Where and when?
Selecting the right locations and times to fish are the keys to success
Choosing locations and times for lure sport.
be a good time to research new ground, but really think about where bass might be, where you could fish from, and what might happen on a flooding and ebbing tide. It’s all very well identifying what could be a great reef to stand on and fish, but what happens when the tide is flooding in, for example?
Ultimately, if you think about searching for a location with a bass sort of brain, then it’s not actually that hard to find likely-looking spots.
WHEN TO FISH
It is the ‘when’ to fish that, to me, is the most complicated question. The whole subject can encompass so many different factors – time of year, size of tide, state of the tide, the best wind direction, strength of wind before it’s unfishable, how much swell the place can take (swell and wind strength are different, remember), whether or not rainwater harms the fishing, or too much colour in the water messes things up, and so on. Of course, we then need to work out the best way to fish the mark.
I don’t mean to make this all sound complicated, but then I have never seen any reason to doubt the expression “five per cent of anglers catch 95 per cent of the fish”, and what all really good anglers have in common is a thorough knowledge of the marks they fish.
Sure, some anglers go far more in depth than others, but the simple fact is that when and where are always going to be the most important factors in fishing, and the more you strive to learn about the locations you fish, the better you will do.
I will give you a few things to think about as you start to get to grips with where you have chosen to fish. From there you should start to build some patterns that help you to narrow down when is the best time.
Firstly, don’t assume that bass come in to feed only on a flooding tide; a lot of places I fish seem to work best on the ebb tide, for example. In general, most of us prefer spring tides for our bass fishing, but this is categorically not always the case.
Indeed, around where I live, I reckon a number of marks fish better on the smaller tides, albeit not the smallest neaps. I tend not to like the biggest big spring tides - logic says they should be good, but I generally prefer the smaller set of springs in a month.
One theory I hear a lot is that the really big spring tides strip off shallow ground too fast for bass to properly hang around and feed, and, to me, this makes a lot of sense. Another argument, though, is that the biggest tides open up more ground for the bass to hunt over.
You might well find that onshore winds give you better fishing, but night fishing with lures is really changing what I think about bass marks, and at night I am more than comfortable with flat calm seas and offshore winds.
You are looking for likely windows of bass activity, but don’t let this then stop you fishing at other times on the same spot; it’s all too easy to become dialed into specific times, and you could well end up missing out on other fish catching times in a tide.
Rougher conditions over shallow, broken ground will to tend to colour the water and fill it with weed much faster than on the deeper marks, albeit I am never targeting bass in what I would call properly deep water.
Of course, it’s great to fish with rods and lures that help you to cover a huge amount of water, but never forget just how close in bass can feed, and especially at night.
There is no exact science to any of this, of course, but I hope this will go some way towards giving you a good starting point to get out there and explore.
“You are looking for likely windows of bass activity”